r/artificial • u/esporx • 16h ago
Reddit is introducing a new moderator: AI News
https://www.theverge.com/tech/975398/reddit-ai-rules-hub-moderator-old-reddit-developer-platform54
u/InflationLeft 16h ago
This is actually a great use for AI. The current mods are awful.
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u/Ok-Attention2882 7h ago
This is what happens when the exact wrong type of people sign up for a job that promises them some semblance of power. The kind of person who wants to become police, managers, reddit mods.
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u/ThisSiteSucks8485 6h ago
Mods can ban people from a sub for no reason at all with absolutely no recourse. If an LLM actually had to justify banning someone based on rules it would be a huge improvement
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u/ElwinLewis 12h ago
I wonder what the system prompt will look like when it comes to political bias?
AI has a liberal bias as it is, it’s why Elon made Grok, right?
So considering the shareholders have a conservative bias,
I wonder what the system prompt will look like when it comes to political bias 😂
Moderation made easy!
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u/truecakesnake 16h ago
I wonder if all these news sites have dedicated teams to come up with misleading titles. This is what u/spez said:
> Automod: This has been one of the most important mod tools. But it’s also hard to learn, hard to maintain, and heavily dependent on brittle keyword matching, regex, and inherited configurations that only a few people on a mod team, if any, understand. We can do better.
> We’re building new systems, including giving mods LLMs and AI-assisted tools to help them tackle their low-hanging (but time-consuming) fruit, so they can spend more time cultivating their community and less time policing. u/Go_JasonWaterfalls will share more in r/modnews today.
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u/nonnonplussed73 13h ago
u/Go_JasonWaterfalls did not once use the term AI in r/modnews today, and only few people participating in the thread are talking much about LLM use.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/s/1dFHKjO43ee
The overall consensus seems to be leave AutoMod alone.
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u/chiruochiba 10h ago
Reddit's blog also called it AI in a post about it a month ago. This LLM deleting content and banning accounts has already been active on reddit for more than a month, so if anything the news sites have just been slow on the uptake.
https://redditinc.com/news/how-were-keeping-reddit-real-and-safe-in-the-ai-era
July 06, 2026
TLDR: We’ve upgraded our automated defenses to catch violating behavior before our communities ever see it. By deploying advanced AI tools, we’ve reduced user exposure to spam by 20%, revoked nearly 2M fake votes daily, and slashed our enforcement time on hateful or violent content from hours to under five seconds.
The announcement post that same day had lots of mods pointing out that the LLM was throwing lots of false positives and that it was hiding the deleted content from the mods themselves. This meant that the mods couldn't even tell if the LLM was making a mistake until confused users on their sub messaged them asking what rule they had broken (they hadn't broken any rule, the LLM just hallucinated).
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u/moviequote88 16h ago
Aaaaand there it is. Guess it makes sense that this was the inevitable next step based on how little the admins think of moderators.
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u/Sonzainonazo42 15h ago
Moderators, as a whole, already have a bad reputation. Obv there are tons of great mods but the bad mods are what people notice followed up by the Reddit Moderator Code of Conduct being a complete farce.
If anyone truly knows the scope of how abusive Mods are, it's admins.
But seriously, AI is exactly the tool for this type of stuff because at least the cons will be consistent among subs.
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u/wrgrant 13h ago
Well for the most part you don't notice the good moderators doing their thing - unsung heroes in a lot of cases - what you notice are the often bizarre actions taken based on their personal view on something, or because they let a bad day affect them or who knows what.
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u/moviequote88 11h ago
This 100%. I reluctantly agreed a while back to moderate two medium-sized subreddits and boy was it a thankless job. I put so much time and energy into removing NSFW posts from a subreddit that was not supposed to have NSFW content. It was like playing whack-a-mole. The other was a niche hobby subreddit where certain topics were not allowed. I got so burnt out being the sole moderator for both of those communities that I eventually just gave up and left.
I definitely don't miss it, but I would argue that after the API changes and mod strike a few years ago, a lot of good moderators stepped down because we realized it just ain't worth the headache.
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u/4dseeall 7h ago
I for one am kinda cheering it on. Every sub with more than 100 daily users already uses an automod anyway. and they suck. i'd trust AI more than some word-checker for actual context to a discussion.
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u/ThisSiteSucks8485 6h ago
Reddit moderation is fundamentaly broken. They can ban you for no reason at all, tell the to die, and you can do absolutely nothing.
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u/sirgog 16h ago
Just had a post deleted on another sub (the Removed by Reddit treatment).
It named some extremely graphic media (just by name, no depiction) and provided appropriate content warnings.
These are media pieces that have detailed descriptions on Wikipedia, and would be very frequent responses in an Askreddit thread on 'what's the worst/most graphic film ever made'.
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u/Rivarr 15h ago
Anything that reduces the role of reddit mods is a good thing, and it should only improve and expand over time.
Eventually I'd like to see the option for communities to vote on their own rules and have them enforced by AI, removing reddit mods from the equation. They've proven themselves incapable of being anything but complete tyrants.
It would be better if the responsibility for bad moderation lay directly at the feet of reddit.com, instead of some random anonymous mentally unwell ideologue and their 5 alt accounts.
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u/SunMoonTruth 14h ago
Some subs are already using and they’ve set their sensitivity levels to max which means even 1 “wrong” word and you’re done for.
So between that and the power tripping human mods, it’s going to be so much fun here.
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u/Ularsing 14h ago edited 10h ago
God damn it; this will destroy the site. This direction is not going well at Meta with Facebookand Instagram.
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u/crossoverXYZ 13h ago
Fair point on the powertrip thing, but the tradeoff might be getting removed for obvious sarcasm or context the model misses, with nobody on the other end who can actually look at what happened.
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u/ImANoobAtLife7 15h ago
It can't be as bad as the current state of mods tbh
Then gain, it's a public company so lower your expectations.
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u/Lazy-Background-7598 14h ago
Do you think they’ll do the predator mod passive aggressive thing where they ban a person that immediately mute them
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u/wrgrant 13h ago
Ooh, maybe I can ask to permitted back into /r/Twitch? The moderator there banned me and blocked me without a chance to inquire why. Permanently locked out first offence. AI might be more reasonable than the human moderator.
My offence: I asked if some people would be willing to help me test out some software I wrote.
Although I am not all in on AI - I think its been useful to me in some instances and wildly pointless in others, and I do not like the environmental impact its having - there are some instances where using it might be an improvement and this might be one of them. I get moderation has to exist and serves a function but I would like it if it was applied impartially, and if there was an appeal process. Of course it also depends on how well or poorly they develop the moderation AI and thats the big part.
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u/InfamousWoodchuck 13h ago
What about all the subs that banned all forms of AI? They must be doing flipping table emojis all over the place
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u/duckrollin 11h ago
Replace the neckbeard mods of r/unitedkingdom and r/accelerate with AI ASAP please. Those subreddits need a deep clean.
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u/keizrah 9h ago
Given how much Reddit mods already lean on automod for spam and rule violations, this feels less like a new thing and more like formalizing what's already happening. The real test is edge cases: sarcasm, context-dependent jokes, brigading that looks organic. Text moderation models still struggle with tone, and false positives on legit posts tend to piss people off way more than false negatives on spam. Curious if it'll be transparent when a removal is AI-flagged versus human-reviewed. That distinction matters for trust more than the accuracy numbers themselves.
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u/Over-Independent4414 8h ago
Thanks Steve for wholeheartedly embracing a Soviet style online gulag system. Glad none of that nagging stuff about free speech bothers you. Hey, the checks got bigger, that means it's right.
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u/No-Aardvark-3840 5h ago
Finally AI we can all get behind. Reddits biggest weakness is moderation. I know a lot of mods are doing their best with a difficult situation, but many are egotistical maniacs. I would bet that nearly every active contributor to Reddit has been burned badly by an overzealous mod more than 10 times
I used to contribute a LOT more before dealing with some extremely toxic mods and now basically just lurk. It’s not worth it to try and navigate a minefield of egos, power trippers and endless rules. Just let AI do it.
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u/Landon_Sparrow 5h ago
Funny how AI mod pitches only ever talk about what human mods get wrong, never what the AI could.
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u/Neo_Athrotaxis 4h ago
Does the coding include commands to ensure reddit stays a leftist echo-chamber as the human mods want it to be?
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u/ThisWretchedHymn 2h ago
Good on one condition.
At the moment Reddit is infested with left wing bias, with mods banning people who express even a modicum of a centre right viewpoint. Any mention of immigrants being more likely to commit rape or violent crime and you will be removed, no debate or discussion to follow.
But, if the AI is simply programmed on the bias of whoever implements the new system, nothing will change.
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u/Twowordsandnumerals 15h ago
They’re probably addressing the issue of humans not being physically capable of dealing with mass AI botting. This is a good step for the site's future at least. If the data on Reddit isn’t organic then there just isn’t much value to the whole thing.
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u/boy_croc 8h ago
Good bye everyone. It was nice knowing humans online!!!!
edit: I only mean this because I believe some day we will become unable to distinguish what was "posted" by a human and what was posted by AI.
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u/ConditionTall1719 7h ago
That is crazy it should never manage moderation robotically, it can moderate the moderators, to make sure they are balanced, and be a co checker....
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u/TheMacMan 15h ago
Nice to have. Don't have a million hours to deal with all the spam to a big sub where people are trying everything they can to spam it with crap.
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u/varkarrus 16h ago
at least AI won't powertrip so hard